Monthly Archives: December 2007

1) When I was coming home in the MTR, the guy sitting next to me was playing with a Rubik’s cube and when he actually solved it I gasped. So he turned to me and handed me the thing and asked me if I want to play and actually started giving me tips. This is amazing because Chinese people never talk to strangers on the MTR, leave alone brown ones.2) In the elevator in my building, the other man in the elevator suddenly turned to me and said: “Are you Indian?” and when I said yes, he said: “It’s so clear” and started talking to me in Hindi. I was so shocked, I could only gape like a goldfish and then burst out into a giggle. This is amazing because a) as mentioned above, Chinese people rarely talk to people in the elevator except their own family/friends, and certainly not to brown people b) How does this man know Hindi?3) Went to straighten my hair and the shampoo-girl (shampooist?) started talking to me in Hindi. It turns out she’s Nepali. As sweet as this is – the Hindi I mean – it’s really embarassing because my Hindi sucks and then I have to choose between attempting to explain why my Hindi sucks or just continuing to stammer in Hindi until they get the point and shift to English by which point I am too crippled with embarassment to say anything. My kids are definitely going to speak Hindi… or maybe Malyalam, or Canto… well, something local other than English.

In my defence:1) I had a cold (slightly) – the excuse I gave to my boss when she asked me if I was going.2) I am antisocial – and so the ‘getting to know’ people bit would not be exactly succesful.3) I am new – and so don’t feel bonding required at Christmas parties4) None of the people around me seemed to be going – so why should I?

Sometimes everything seems to be going just slightly wrong. For starters…

1) You think your story is due on Tuesday evening and then your boss comes, just as you are reading the article on Indian bloggers, and tells you it’s due on Tuesday morning which means you have to write it that night and it’s already six and you have a facial at six-thirty2) You rush home from facial and try to call your husband who has taken himself off to Korea on work (hmph!) and you just cannot get through.3) You go online to check the hotel number and it’s inexplicably elusive. You start to get a headache.4) The hotel website opens and then the computer hangs and refuses to shut down, indicating that this is A VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM5) You take deep breaths refusing to panic and decide to just go into office early tomorrow and use the computer there.6) You realise that you have lost your entry pass and therefore may not be able to enter the office without causing major ruckus. Your headache starts to get very bad.7) Here’s where you take a few deep breaths before you turn house upside down in search for card while muttering prayers under your breath. God hears you and you locate the card inside the returned laundry. Which means your electronic pass went into the laundry. But nvm. It seems to be fine.8) You decide to call it a day and go to bed, while letting the computer battery drain overnight and praying for it.9) You wake up the next morning. The computer battery has died. You switch it on and it’s working perfectly. Thank you God.10) You manage to write up your story and go to work. You send it to your boss. After many hours, your boss tells you she does not like the story. Hmph! BUT she cannot hold it because she’s dug herself into a hole and doesn’t have another story. Ha! BUT this means I know she’s going to be nag me more about story angles in the future. Gah!11) I clarify future story angle with her and clear booking a photographer. After I done the booking, girl to be photographed calls and says can we change the time. Hmph!12) I go back to change the time and realise that while it’s a pain in the arse to unbook, it’s a good thing I had to because I had actually made the booking for the wrong day.And that’s why I believe there’s someone out there looking out for me because if there wasn’t, I’d be in complete SHITE.

Yesterday we went to Mong Kong. This is like Kowloon’s version of Causeway Bay only bigger, more crowded and somewhat cheaper and smellier.

After a shaky start in which V slouched around while I tried to shop for Christmas gifts for the cousins’ growing brood of kids, we breaked for lunch. This was had in a small Thai restaurant on the side of the street market. The food was pretty great – I love Thai food. It’s enough like Indian food but more subtle.

Then V and I came to a compromise. We would shop for sneakers. V allegedly needs them – honestly for all the flak I get I think the man has more shoes than me and his are way more expensive – and though I am generally averse to sneakers, they are after all shoes. And there is a whole street dedicated to sneakers that we haven’t explored before. A coup of sorts was achieved when V bought a pair of black suede sneakers and relegated his ugh 50cents white ones to a bag. Honestly, white sneakers on a guy is not so fly. Then, I decided I wanted red sneakers – they’re like the shoes we used to wear in school only a little chunkier and in happy colours. So kind of back-to-school but cooler. Obviously – we were so not cool in school I’ve realised after someone circulated our class photograph on Facebook. I nearly drove V nuts being unable to decide which ones fit me and then whether I wanted boots or the normal sneaker ones. Ended up tossing a coin. I’m scared to put them on today because what if they don’t fit?

Then we tried to find the (fake – i think) dvd shop which has mysteriously closed down and ended up following people into malls where we made some amazing discoveries:a) Entire mall dedicated to toy collectors. Animatrix, Simpsons, Peanuts and some doll call Blyth, the clothes of which cost $200 on sale. Rather amusingly V got very hung up on finding a Bart doll. I don’t know whether having an inspirational Bart icon in our house is going to be a good thing though.b) This weird instant photograph game where you go into a booth, choose a background click a couple of photos and then personalize it. You have limited time to do it which means the results are generally crazy but it does make it more fun. For 40$ we now have two wallet sized laminated photos of ourselves looking idiotic but could have been worse.

A couple of malls later my legs were killing me so we went for a haircut. Well, V got a haircut and I got a ‘treatment’. I went in thinking I would pay $70 – to be fair though, practically impossible to get hair treated for that price – and ended up paying $250. The upshot is that my hair is silky and I think I want to straighten it again.

When we finished it was 10 pm and the hairdresser showed no signs of shutting down – Mong Kok apparently never sleeps – and there were women getting their hair set in curls which makes no sense because isn’t it a bit too late for that?

Starving again we trudged along and suddenly found ourselves in an entire road of street food. Now, this is rare in HK because the government is trying to shut down all the dai pai dongs. And of course being from Bombay anything dirty and scrumy strikes me as must-be-good food. So we gingerly tiptoe in and sit down trying not to touch anything – outside was better, the place was filthy even for me and the woman who cleaned our table chucked all the leftover bones and chopsticks on the floor. We have the mussels omlette (a Thai specialitiy) and pot rice which I guess was ok. An interesting experience but I would not repeat. Had to drink Coke to kill whatever germs had been ingested.

Then we landed up in a street market where they were selling all sorts of interesting trinkets – including a street that looked like Goa with the hippie bags, which explains where the kids in HK get them – and when we rounded the corner were landed up in this street of tents, housing fortune tellers. Really, it’s a whole new world out there. Of course, we had to get our fortune told – but the good ones, who had lines of girls in front of their tents – spoke only Canto and the one who I used was crap and told me I would have a baby next month and should by the Mark Six tomorrow. Loser! I think she thought I would be happy to have a baby. She also kept waving hello to people while telling my fortune whihc I think is really bad form.

1) On Monday I emailed my boss three ideas and she came back and said she liked all three of them.2) Over the past week I have learnt about:a) Brewing the finest cup of expresso from a barista world champion judgeb) Collecting watches from the head of the watch department at Sothebysc) China’s official state limousineand over the past weeks I have met railway buffs, rare book collectors, artists, vintage car owners.3) In between interviews, I get to waste time shopping.4) I get to travel of places all over the city and discover new areas – while getting lost of course.5) I have enough stories for the next two weeks. In fact, one extra!And then I go on leave.

In honour of all the ballet I have been watching, I have finally succumed – one year late, I know – to the trend and bought ballet slippers. Also because I have finally realised that closed shoes, heels and stalking around town does not make for a good combination. Actually neither does open toes, heels and stalking around town but closed shoes somehow are worse because there’s more leather for your toes to rub on and blister. If I seem to be obsessed with my feet, you would be too if you went through what I did on Friday. I am buying (gasp) flats and closed toes aren’t I?

If you’re wondering what constitutes ALL the ballet I have been watching, went for Swan Lake on Ice yesterday. Okay so it was skating not ballet but the music was written for ballet and skating can be very ballet-esque. They even, inexplicably, had a bit of ballet in between which I thought was totally unnecessary because why freeze off the poor girl’s feet – they were pointy-toeing on ice – just to remind us that Swan Lake was indeed originally a ballet. That said, the music is incredible. I’ve heard – and probably could even play – the famous swan bit but even the other parts are amazing, actually more amazing that the swan bit, which can get a bit tiresome to be honest. The plot of these ballets are so filmy – this is a good thing because otherwise unless you read the story beforehand you’d have no clue what is going on. To help us along though, they had the swan princess in white with blonde hair and the evil temptress in black with black hair and the evil villian also in black and at one point they drew a circle around him in fire, just in case we hadn’t got that he was evil. A cliche but a very cool way of spelling it out. The fire, I mean, not the black costumes.

We followed that up with masal dosa and pav bhaji at a nearby Indian restaurant. Really, I should get out more. That pav bhaji was pretty good.

All in all was a very arty weekend. On Saturday went to a motor show – in a desperate attempt to get stories – where I got to sit in a car which Chairman Mao had used and managed to bump my head on the way out. Then went to an art gallery opening, where pets were invited. Luckily it was just dogs. Lucky because the dogs were driving each other nuts. I am always happy when I see badly behaved dogs – unlike children – because I can assure myself that Zo is not the worst.

Instead of going home like good children after that we went out drinking on ‘the dark side’. That’s the snobby HK island reference to Kowloon. I think it’s awful but I can’t resist using it even though I quite like Kowloon and wouldn’t be averse to living there. Actually maybe not. Ironically, we ended up in Bulldogs which has a branch in Lan Kwai Fong also. But, as we tried to tell our English friend who kept grumbling that there were too many Englishmen (and too few lissome young things) in the pub, there were stunning views of the harbour to enjoy. Except for him they were slightly obscured by my head and a rash of trees they had planted in the middle of the road.

On the way back to HK, we got ripped off by a taxi. This is what happens when you try to jump the queue. There has got to be a catch, and the catch is that the cabbie tries to rip you off. That is, he draws near the closest tunnel and says “very busy very busy” (even though it was 12 am as pointed out by English friend who we promptly ignored on groundes of intoxication) and then proceeds to the next tunnel which is halfway to the airport and has a higher toll. And I thought this only happens in India.

Closed shoes are so not a good idea. If you walk more than 50 steps in them they cause blisters. Agonizing ones. Your toes scream in agony as you put one step in front of another.

But I do. All the way to the antiquarian bookfair at Pacific Place where I step into a stall and am magnetically drawn to a first edition of Howl which I open, flip past the first page on which Ginsberg has schizophrenically doodled flowers and signed his name, and read with a soppy smile on my face:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed bymadness, starving hysterical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawnlooking for an angry fix…

And then a kindly slightly mad looking man in a beard and a coyboy hat passes me a folder of letters, written by Ginsberg himself to presumably his wife… snippets of poems, anechdotes about what the other Beats – Burroughs, Kerouc et al – were up to and a plan of the Academy Aawards with inexplicably Ginsberg’s signature behind it just where my finger is and I am soaked up in another time, a time of protest and marijuana and idealism and a time thirty or so years after that when I sat at a desk in a grimy-ish classroom in a historic stone building sipping coffee and ecstatically discovering that other time thirty years ago…

And then my phone rings, I hand the folder back and drag my bruised feet three floors down to the high-end grocery downstairs where we buy half a roast chicken and lamb curry for dinner.